Miss Timmins' School for Girls

by Nayana Currimbhoy

  We knew we had to talk to her. “It is a matter of life and death for us,” we told each other solemnly, having convinced ourselves by now that we would soon be led out of school in handcuffs.

  “Look, we know more than anyone else could know about this,” we told her after we had pulled her out of her dorm. Shobha was one of the types you could not pull rank on. She was not afraid of anything. We had to convince her that we had a bigger secret. We took her down to the hockey pitch. The stone benches were still wet and the ground was slushy as we stood around her in a huddle. We swore each other to secrecy, and told our story first. She listened to our tale with growing excitement, and then she told us hers.

  She said she was reading Lolita with a torch under her bed, after lights out.

  “You know, my bed is so close to Nelly’s bathroom, I’m tuned to listening for her movements even in my sleep,” she began, drawing it out. She was as cool as a cucumber.

  I knew that bed in Upper Willoughby. I had it in standard nine. You could hear Nelly’s movements and bathroom noises booming through the pipes. Sometimes, we all put our ears against the wall, waiting to hear her fart.

  We hardly ever heard voices. She had tea with the missionaries, “special talks,” and prayer meetings in her private drawing room, which faced the lower garden and was not close enough for the voices to reach us.

  “But last night, after lights out,” said Shobha, “I heard murmurs, so of course I put my ear against that exact spot in the wall, and one voice became louder. It was Prince. I know it was. I only heard a few words, but what I heard is etched like the Ten Commandments in my mind. Word for word.”

  “She said, ‘Couldn’t you tell me? Just one sign, even? Do you know what it would have meant to me?’ She was sobbing, those shuddering kinds of sobs people make when someone dies or something. The wind came up and the rain was spluttering and splattering on the roof, and all I could hear for some time were hisses and murmurs. But I am sure it was Nelly talking and pleading. Then, suddenly, above the rain, clear and sharp, Prince screeched, ‘You bloody hypocrite. You bloody bitch. Keeping me here like your pet monkey. So saintly.’ I thought the whole of Lower Willoughby would have heard.”

  And then, Shobha heard Nelly say, “Let us pray. Our Lord will show you His mercy, my child, as He did to me.”

  Ramona was crying. Shobha, who had not been in the belly of the beast, was very excited. “Let’s not tell anyone anything anymore,” she said. “Let’s solve the whole thing ourselves, then you will be free. And we have so many clues. We’ll get poor Shankar out of jail.”

  We began to feel better. Yes, we saw ourselves as heroines, on the front page of the Poona Herald. But first we’d have to solve the problem of the raincoats.

  “That is a step we must overleap, for in our way it lies,” we chanted, and the reassuring rhythm of Macbeth calmed us down.

  No one in school ever had an extra raincoat. The school list decreed only one raincoat and one pair of gum boots. We could conceivably rob three raincoats from the teachers, but that seemed far too dangerous. It was Shobha, finally, who had the brilliant idea.

  “So let’s steal lots of raincoats instead,” said Shobha.

  If only three of us did not have our raincoats, it would be very suspicious. But what if lots of random girls did not have their raincoats? It would be chalked up as another mystery of that mysterious time.

  “Or they might think it is a petty thief,” said Akhila.

  We had to act right away. The girls were dispersed, talking in tense whispers, and the teachers were in each other’s rooms, muttering and crying. Raincoats were hung on a row of pegs outside each dorm. We went to the nearest dorms, and grabbed three or four raincoats, each of the same color, folded them over our arms to look like one, and walked as casually as we could down to the hockey pitch, at the very bottom of the school. There, past the school bakery, was a footpath to the lowest tier of Panchgani.

  The road was flanked by three newer, less established boarding schools: Bata, Green Lawns, and Oaks. In all our years in Panchgani, none of us had ever been down that road. We had no truck with those schools. We looked down on them. We decided against entering any of them to leave the raincoats, and saw, after Green Lawns, a small steep footpath used by the villagers in the valley. We dumped the raincoats in a heap behind some trees. “I hope the village children use them,” said Akhila. And we ran back and got into the school with enough time to saunter into line when the lunch bell rang.

  After lunch, the four of us were back on the hospital steps, when Smita Sheth, daughter of the owners of Panchgani Stores, came looking for us. She lived with her parents, and was one of the few girls who attended the school as a “day scholar.” She was greatly valued because she was our link to the outside. She had brought a note from Shobha’s boyfriend. Shobha put the letter in her pocket with a proud look, and said she would catch up with us later. But ten minutes later she came panting up to us, so excited she could hardly talk.

  “The plot thickens,” she announced. Dushant, her boyfriend, had also been there that night, and had seen something very different.

  When the rain stopped, he wrote, he and two of his friends had skinged out of school and walked to Shankar’s den of vice, hoping to buy some cheap rum.

  No Timmins girl in living memory had ever gone to Shankar’s den of vice. That was way beyond the outer edge of the Timmins code. The cave from which Shankar sold his wares, a hollow carved of volcanic rock below the steep edge of table-land, was called Devil’s Kitchen. It was said to be haunted by the ghosts of the marriage party crushed by the boulder that had been dislodged from there by an eruption of the volcano many, many years ago. The boulder now rested precariously halfway down the hill.

  When Dushant and his friends got there, they saw the body at Shankar’s feet. Shankar was bent over her. “We did not stop to look. Shankar told us to leave at once,” Dushant had written. “But I wanted to tell you that, on the way up, we saw that strange new teacher, the one with the big red birthmark. She was running down the road from table-land, looking wild, almost mad. Could she have done it?”

  Miss Apte. Why was she there on table-land in the middle of the night? “Curiouser and curiouser,” said Ramona, rubbing her hands.

  “Let’s get serious, girls,” we told each other. Ramona’s cheeks were red with excitement. With the full weight of all our detective knowledge from Agatha Christie, whom we were allowed to read, and from James Hadley Chase, whom we were not allowed to read but we got from Ramona’s brother, we made a chart of the scene of the crime. We became the Find-Outers from Enid Blyton’s books, our first detective novels. We knew we must make a list.

  All the People on or Around Table-Land That Night, and Who Saw Them

  Ramona, Akhila, and Nandita—known to be seen by: Miss Prince

  Miss Prince—known to be seen by: the girls, the boys, Shankar, Nelly. Maybe by Apt.

  Miss Nelson—known to be seen by: the girls

  Miss Apte—known to be seen by: the boys

  Shankar—known to be seen by: the boys

  Dushant and two friends—known to be seen by: Shankar

  We were very pleased with our chart. It suggested that more of these people could actually have seen each other. After some time, we changed the Miss Prince line to read:

  Miss Prince—known to be seen by the girls (alive), the boys (dead), Shankar (perhaps dead), Miss Apte (dead or alive?), Miss Nelson (alive).

  We should not rule out anyone, said Shobha. But ourselves, we agreed. So we revised it accordingly: “Shankar (dead/alive?), the boys (dead/alive?), and Nelson (dead/alive?).” Any one of them could have seen her alive and been the cause of her death.

  We tied together a little booklet from pages torn out of Shobha’s Hindi rough book, and wrote “Murder on a Monsoon Night” on the first page as a working title.

  On t
he second page, we wrote “The Theory.” The plan was to discount nothing, take nothing for granted, but have a theory so we could have a plan.

  My theory was that after the fight overheard by Shobha, Nelly followed Miss Prince up to table-land. She sat on the rocks and she prayed for strength. That is when we saw her. She had not seen us because her eyes had been closed in prayer. After we left, she went up to Miss Prince and tried to plead with her, tell her to change her ways. “She said, ‘Let the Lord into your heart, my poor lost child,’ ” mimicked Akhila. Miss Prince, as we all knew, was completely unpredictable. So maybe Nelly tried to put an arm around her and was pushed away, and maybe, in the scuffle, Miss Prince slipped and fell over the edge.

  Akhila and Ramona felt that Nelly had pushed her. They surmised that after the fight, something in Nelly had snapped. She had followed Miss Prince to table-land, said her prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, and then pushed Miss Prince over the edge, believing that she was doing the Lord’s work.

  Shobha believed it was Apt. She could not say why. “It is just my intuition, and don’t forget, girls, intuition must play a large role in detection technique,” she said. “She’s a deep one, a chhupa rustam. Looks so good and bland, but she’s not. And what was she doing on table-land?”

  In fact, said Shobha, Radha just told the dorm yesterday that she had seen Apt with Prince. They were running down the slippery way to the hockey pitch in the rain, the Prince and Apt, sliding and giggling. That sealed it for Shobha. “There was something between them,” she said, her eyes round and large.

  By no stretch of imagination could I imagine Miss Apte shoving Prince off a cliff. Nor could I imagine her having an affair with Prince. Young girls had crushes on prefects, prefects had crushes on teachers. Friendships between girls became intense and all-consuming and sometimes as obsessive as love affairs, though actual lesbian affairs were not known to happen in our school. But this was all boarding school chatter. Miss Apte did not grow up like us.

  The first day she walked into our class, thin and tentative and as nervous as a fawn, I thought, She’s going to be as bad as Jacinta and that lot. And when she said “Hello, I am Charulata Apte from Indore” in that terrible vernacular accent, I thought, What does she know about literature?

  Served me right for being such a Bombay snob.

  She turned out to be the best teacher I ever had. I forgot about her accent and her scarred face. I loved her classes. She helped me think about women’s lib and hippies and Bob Dylan and all the things happening in the wide world outside our gates, and Macbeth as well.

  “I don’t think she’s the type to have an affair with a woman at all,” I said. “She wears Indian outfits, and she’s from a small town. Too conventional.” Lesbians should be brash and bold, I would think. Like Prince.

  “But Radha saw them together.”

  “So, they slid down the slope in the rain. So what?” I said.

  “Must have been Miss Prince trying to seduce her. In fact, I was always afraid walking down the covered steps alone with Miss Prince. God knows what she might have done,” piped Akhila.

  “Idiot,” said Shobha contemptuously. “Like she had nothing better to do but pine to hold your hand.”

  Akhila blushed and bit her lip. But I began to think there might be some truth in there. Prince might have set her sights on the innocent Charulata Apte.

  All of us agreed that Shankar was the least likely of the suspects, mainly because the Prince and Shankar were from different worlds.

  “He could have been up there to sell her pot, you never know,” said Ramona. “We should not rule anything out.” We knew that was the first rule of detection. Suspect everyone. That would be our motto. Shankar could have sold her drugs up on table-land near the witches’ needle and then gotten into some drugged argument and pushed her down. His den was directly below that edge of the plateau, and although there was no footpath down the steep cliff edge, he could have walked down the main road and come around to his den to see if she was dead. The boys could have come across him then as he was bending over the dead body. It was hard to imagine, though, Shankar in a scuffle with a white woman. Quite preposterous, we agreed.

  The afternoon seemed to stretch forever as we sat on the hospital steps. Rainwater stopped running down the gutters, and a weak sun popped occasionally out of the cloud cover.

  We had two main suspects: Nelly and Apt. We decided to keep a close watch on both of them. The time is now, we agreed. Akhila had it on the authority of some forgotten book that criminals always revisit the scene of their crimes within forty-eight hours “to check if they left any clues.”

  It was decided that we would split up into two groups of two, each group taking charge of one suspect. Akhila and Shobha took Nelly, and Ramona and I got the Apt.

  When the bell rang to summon us to line up for church the next day, there was, as expected, a commotion in the dorm verandas. We had been told to wear our red-checked dresses, navy-blue blazers, and berets, which we always wore to church in the monsoon term. With Nelly in her room all day, and Willy and Manson closeted with Inspector Woggle, the lines of authority were quite limp. Miss Henderson, confronted with a mass of fifteen girls without raincoats on the way to Miss Prince’s memorial service, decided that those girls would just have to stay behind. Sister Richards offered to watch us. “Girls, get your needlework or reading, and sit in or around the dining room,” Hendy said as she left.

  Shobha, who did have her raincoat, was about to pretend that she did not when we saw Nelly step out of her room and walk slowly up the stairs without looking to the left or the right. She wore a black dress made of shiny silk, white gloves that came up to her elbows, and a black wide-brimmed hat with a net that covered the eyes. We had never come across anyone dressed like that except in Hitchcock movies seen during holidays in Bombay.

  Shobha gave us the thumbs-up, Akhila quickly borrowed a raincoat from Rita Bhatia, who did have her raincoat but preferred not to go, and the two of them left for church while Ramona and I watched for Miss Apte, but she did not leave her room that evening. We sat around gossiping in hushed voices, the stolen raincoats now another topic jumping among the scattered girls in their red-checked dresses. The school had the ruleless feeling of the last day of term, when we would be packing our sheets and blankets into our holdalls. Sister Richards launched into a long and gory story of some general who had gone home on leave to find his wife with a lover, pulled out a pistol, shot the two in the bed, and then gone on to shoot himself while his children watched. I supposed it was meant to keep us from speculating about the death in Panchgani. “Or,” said Ramona darkly, “maybe she knows something. She may be hinting that it was an act of passion.”

  Shobha and Akhila reported that Pastor Reese’s sermon at the service was loud and emotional, concentrating mostly on the saintly lives of Moira Prince’s parents. The Lord was charged to have mercy on her soul and her parents’ souls in their heavenly abode. There were sniffles from the back, where family friends from Nasik and Sunbeam teachers with swollen eyes were seated. Miss Mathews had a crying fit. But Nelson sat dark and erect in a corner at the back and the girls could hardly see her, though they craned their necks. After the service, the girls were walked back to school by Miss Raju, a fat history teacher with calloused feet, while the rest of the teachers stayed for the burial in the church cemetery.

  No one had died in the school for nearly sixty years. The last Timmins teacher to be buried in the cemetery behind the red church building had been Miss Pearsall in 1917. The cemetery recorded the British dead from the dawn of Panchgani, and we knew every headstone.

  The church and the pastor were shared with St. Paul’s School, which belonged to the same Scottish Presbyterian mission as Timmins. But the boys’ school did not harbor any spinster missionaries, and the Lord’s hand rested more lightly on their daily schedule. The boys who came to church were usually the on
es interested in looking at the girls.

  After the sermon and prayers that day, Pastor Reese announced that a gold plaque dedicated to Moira Prince and her parents, Joseph and Martha Prince, would be hung on the wall of the church. It would be placed next to the one for Mary, Minnie, and Emma, daughters of a prior pastor, who, according to the ornate gold plaque, perished during a storm in Vai.

  “The plaque has been donated by Miss Nelson,” said Pastor Reese solemnly.

  That evening, Willy, Nelly, and Manson, the Holy Trinity, gathered for dinner in Miss Nelson’s private drawing room. The Apt did not leave her room, and we saw the ayah take her dinner to her on a tray. We Apt-watchers agreed to sneak out after lights out and watch her room.

  “What ho, Malvolio,” muttered Ramona when, soon after lights out, Apt’s back door squeaked open and she slunk out and started walking at a determined pace down Oak Lane. I was plump and thought I was wise because I lived mostly in my books. Ramona was nervy and wired. She hated Shakespeare, but I had to admit that it was she who came out with the most unexpected and quotable of quotes.

  We followed at a distance, holding hands for courage. We wore randomly borrowed raincoats and looked quite anonymous, we thought, like women walking in a Panchgani monsoon. We had spent months planning our last escape, but here we were just walking out like this, so easy. It was, of course, a time of more chaos in school than we could have imagined in our wildest dreams.

  We poked each other breathless with excitement when she went to Dr. Desai’s dispensary and climbed up the stairs.

  She emerged after about ten minutes, accompanied by Merch. We knew Merch, he taught us geography one summer in a listless, funny sort of way. We were doing North America that year, and I remember he said Pawtucket could have gotten its name because it tucked the paw of Connecticut, and I never did figure that one out.

  We trailed them at a distance. There was a light mist in the air that night, and they seemed not to even be aware of us. Merch was wearing gum boots and a dark red pullover. He had no raincoat. We did not dare to talk. We walked quietly, heads bowed. Before they even turned up the fork from the municipal park to which no one ever went, we knew they could be headed to only one place: table-land.